Veiled rebellion: Female medical students go underground in Afghanistan

Lima stayed home the last time the Taliban inspected the hospital where she secretly trains as a nurse.

After five years of medical training, Lima, 28, should be one year into her residency as a doctor, perfecting her diagnostic skills. Instead, she takes temperatures and administers injections, tasks she has been doing at an emergency room in Kabul for three months now. While this is not the work she expected to be doing at this point in her career, she’s happy to at least be doing this.

“Being at the hospital means I can stay close to my field. It helps me to stay connected to it,” Lima told media over the course of several telephone calls. She is identified by her first name only for safety reasons.

Lima was just weeks away from graduating from a medical school in Kabul when the Taliban banned higher education for women last December, interrupting her studies and that of thousands of other women. Women already qualified as doctors, nurses and other medical workers are permitted to continue in their jobs, but no new women may enter the field or undertake training.

More than 3,000 women who had already graduated from medical schools before the ban were barred from taking the board exams required to practise, depriving the country – already struggling from a dire shortage of female medical workers – of a desperately needed infusion of new doctors.

For Lima, medicine has been a lifelong dream. She longs to become a surgeon, partially because she knows there is a shortage of them.

“My biggest hope is to help people,” she said.

Her family moved home to Afghanistan from Pakistan so she could attend university in Kabul where she thrived – she did well in her classes and was appointed her class’s “leader”, handling administrative tasks.

On the day they heard about the new ban on women completing medical studies, Lima and her classmates were having lunch together. They cried together because of what this would mean for their future and because they were worried they would not be able to see each other again. The Taliban’s strict ban on women leaving their homes without a male chaperone makes meeting friends near-impossible.